Critique of Obama’s “More Perfect Union”

Barack Obama delivered a speech in Philadelphia yesterday. The speech was intended to address a significant negative reaction to statements made by Obama’s pastor Jeremiah Wright.

(http://rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/people2/just_8_have_favorable_opinion_of_pastor_jeremiah_wright)

In my estimation, this speech was lacking thematic clarity. I would liken it to a horoscope … a jumble of ideas loosely tied together from which the listener can latch onto whatever resonates with his or her own experience. As such, it may be effective for some of its audience (the ones who are inclined to believe in horoscopes give Obama the benefit of the doubt). However, for those that needed to understand Obama’s rationale for closely associating himself and his family with Pastor Wright and the Trinity United Church of Christ, the speech came up short.

Let me say for the record that Obama and his team have proven themselves to be communicators of the first order. Thus there is a different standard for his speeches. Usually after an Obama speech, I can immediately jot down the main theme, the target audience, the intended take-away, etc. However this time, the only thing that was clear was the target audience – clearly this was the swing voting blue collar white males.

I will do my best to critique this speech. But I will qualify my commentary by saying that 10 different people could easily have10 different interpretations.

Theme of the Speech

In speechwriting 101, you are taught to immediately establish the theme … support … support … support … then conclude with a re-statement of theme. Obama doesn’t follow the template and thus, the theme is not clear.

In “A More Perfect Union”, Obama starts with 4 paragraphs of background on the Constitution, the founding fathers handling of the slavery issue, and the subsequent struggle to achieve the ideal of equality.

Finally, Obama makes the following statement which I believe is the theme of the speech:

“…unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction – towards a better future for of children and our grandchildren. “

Or restated: Through better understanding and alignment of goals between races we can take another incremental step on the way to our Constitutional ideal of equality.

Now restated as I believe this is meant to be interpreted by the target audience: Listen working class whites, YOU are not being treated equally AND African-Americans are not being treated equally as the Constitution says we should be. If these two groups can align their goals, they can form a powerful successful coalition.

So from this, I think we're going to get something similar to Obama's Pennsylvania stump speech.

Supporting Point 1: When racial issues are not in the way, this coalition has been successful

“Throughout the first year of this campaign, against all predictions to the contrary, we saw how hungry the American people were for this message of unity. Despite the temptation to view my candidacy through a purely racial lens, we won commanding victories in states with some of the whitest populations in the country. In South Carolina, where the Confederate Flag still flies, we built a powerful coalition of African Americans and white Americans. “

(Nevermind that the white Americans have been more upscale than working class)

Supporting Point 2: African Americans need improved infrastructure to enable the American Dream (or alternatively the establishment has always done us wrong)

“ … Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.” We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students.

Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments – meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today’s urban and rural communities.

A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family, contributed to the erosion of black families – a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods – parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement – all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us. “

Supporting Point 3: Working class whites need the same infrastructure to maintain the opportunity of achieving the American Dream (or alternatively, now the establishment is doing you wrong)

“…Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time. “

Supporting Point 4: This coalition which would otherwise be natural is kept apart by the political exploitation of racial resentment

“… Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze – a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns – this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding. “

Supporting Point 5: A great example of racial resentment exploited for political purposes … Jeremiah Wright

“…On one end of the spectrum, we’ve heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it’s based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap. On the other end, we’ve heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike.

I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy. For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely – just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.
But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country – a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

As such, Reverend Wright’s comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems – two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.

Given my background, my politics, and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way “

So in other words, Obama doesn’t deny that resentment and anger exist in his church. Furthermore his friend and former pastor presents a “profoundly distorted” view of this country … which Obama condemns.

The big problem here is not that Obama and Wright are buddies, but that Wright is being taken out of context for the purposes of political exploitation

The $64K question: Why is the Obama-Wright relationship not a problem?

“…The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God’s work here on Earth – by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.

In my first book, Dreams From My Father, I described the experience of my first service at Trinity:

“People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend’s voice up into the rafters….And in that single note – hope! – I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones. Those stories – of survival, and freedom, and hope – became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn’t need to feel shame about…memories that all people might study and cherish – and with which we could start to rebuild.”

That has been my experience at Trinity. Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety – the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity’s services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions – the good and the bad – of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.
Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable. I can assure you it is not. I suppose the politically safe thing would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork. We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.

But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America – to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality. “

Restated: Jeremiah Wright has done enough good in Obama’s life that he can overlook (and condemn) the “profoundly distorted” view of this country. Obama knows that there are underlying reasons why Wright is what he is. Furthermore Wright reflects (albeit in an extreme) the feelings of his community. Obama doesn’t want to disown his church and his community over his disagreements on the country and on racial resentment. He just wants to divorce himself from those ideas and still have those relationships. Obama then goes on to compare his relationship with Wright with his relationship to his grandmother who also made him “cringe” from time to time.

Now, if I put myself in the shoes of a working class white, I see Obama’s dilemma. I too have grandparents, uncles, etc that make me cringe. Yet I still love them. So the idea of the Obama-Wright friendship might not bother me anymore.

However, when I start imagining myself in a community and a church that is overtly bigoted and anti-American … this is a little tougher to swallow. However if my race was at one time enslaved and then suffered a century of injustice after that, OK … I might take Obama’s word for it.

But the final jump that I am asked to make is that Obama can completely divorce himself from these ideas held by his church and his community. Furthermore, that even though he disagrees with these ideas, he’s willing to steep his children in this church and community … no doubt perpetuating these bad ideas. The bottom line is that I think most people would find a church and community where those ideas that they consider bad are less intense for the benefit of their children.

I don’t think most people make that last jump. And I think some people won’t give Obama the benefit of the doubt on the anti-American and bigotry in their church leap. They’ll imagine themselves in a church where African Americans or America was being derided and they’ll stop thinking about the circumstances that might underlie that behavior. So at best Obama’s white working class audience will be uncomfortable with his explanation. At worst, they will reject his explanation out of hand.

Conclusion

I found this speech to be unusually poorly organized. There was a weak statement of theme, ideas didn’t flow correctly, and the ending restatement of theme was non-existent. Comparisons to “I have a dream” are completely beyond the pale as anyone who listened to Dr. King's speech could tell you the theme and the bullet points.

In my mind, the poor organization of the speech is suspect. Obama and his team are too good to put out a product like this at this moment. Did Obama mean to confuse us? Was he looking for a horoscope type reaction? Or worse … was he looking for an emperor has no clothes reaction? I can easily envision that Obama saw that his argument to his target audience was weak (at least with respect to Pastor Wright) and thus he had to give a speech that was a lot harder to figure out. He mixed his normal stump argument with a lot of distracting intellectually honest stuff about race and then threw in the Jermiah Wright argument. In the end we are all scratching our heads, wondering which way is up, and we’ve forgotten what this was all about in the first place.

The net effect of all this is that we're not talking about Jeremiah Wright anymore which is good for Obama. However, I have a feeling this isn't the last time we'll be examining this topic.